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Time. There isn’t enough of it, right? After all, if you could add additional hours to your day, certainly you could find more opportunities to be active.
Here’s the thing. If you look around, you’ll find a lot of people who don't believe that a lack of time is a good excuse for not doing something – especially when it comes to working out. Certainly there will be days when we don’t feel like moving our bodies. But if you get that feeling, own it. Tell it like it is. Say, “I just don’t want to do it today. I’d rather sit here with my laptop, put my feet up, and read blogs.”
Believe me, I’ve said those words. But when I have those days where I don’t feel like working out, I don’t tell myself it’s because I don’t have enough time. And yes, I realize I probably have more free time than, say, a woman with multiple children – but that doesn’t mean it can’t be done. And if you can’t fit in a long workout all at once, it’s perfectly okay to split things up.
Carmen is the mother of six children (which means if anyone should have an excuse not to exercise, it’s her). Although she prefers to get her workouts done all at once, what works for her is to break her activities into whatever chunks of time she can manage.
So then I thought that I'd get dinner on the table and run while [the kids] ate. They sat to eat and I thought, "Well, just let me get the dishes put away, and then I'll go." But that didn't work, so the next thought was to put my little girls to bed and go running THEN. It was dark at that point and I'd have to go on the treadmill or the elliptical – and I hate both. But I got on the elliptical; and then the phone rang and I had to figure out something for someone. I had been on the elliptical for 5 entire minutes. […]
I've had a few people talk to me about successful weight loss recently, and the one thing that they keep coming back to is time. "I'd love to work out, but I don't have the time." Today, I did not have the time. I did it in small chunks, but I did it. 45 minutes spread out is still 45 minutes.
Do you ever feel like if you didn’t do something at the time of day you wanted to do it, then that’s it? Maybe you missed your morning run due to oversleeping, and in the evening after work you’d rather watch TV? We all have our preferences about when we’d like to be active, but if something is important to you, you’ll fit it in when you can. When I first joined a gym last summer, for months I was going regularly in the mornings to do cardio – early, before work, at least 4-5 days a week. Then I moved farther away from my gym, and it was no longer feasible to go before work because I’d have to get up ultra-early (due to having to fight my way through traffic).
So what did I do? I adapted. I still go to the gym at least three days a week to do weights, but now I’ve started running outside instead of relying on an elliptical machine. If I get home from work in the evening and don’t feel like driving across town, I can tie on my sneakers instead. Since it doesn’t require so much advance preparation, I'm more motivated to do that bit of activity before I settle in for the night.
Another example: my roommate and I were talking recently about various exercises, and I was telling her that I tend to wait and do the ab exercises I can do at home, once I get home (as opposed to doing them at the gym). When I work my abs at the gym, I use a bench, or an exercise ball, or a Captain’s chair – things I don’t personally own. But anything I can do while lying on the floor can wait until I get home.
“You mean you don’t lose your motivation once you leave the gym?” she asked. And that’s just it
